Measure Website Performance with User Timings

Michael Garrity

Posted on 5.08.2012

When it comes to a
website’s productivity, every little detail is important. For some time now,
Google Analytics has provided its users with Site Speed reports to study their
site’s page load times, and now the company has developed User Timings, so
users can measure and diagnose page speeds with more refined accuracy.

User Timings will allow Web workers to track and visualize
user-defined custom timings about websites, which will show the execution speed
or load time of a discrete hit, or even user interaction, depending on what the
Google Analytics user decides to track. Included in these metrics are the load
speeds of specific images and resources, the response times of select button
clicks, AJAX
actions timings both before and after onLoad events and more.

Plus, these User Timings are the preferred method for
tracking various action timing metrics, as they won’t alter page view counts.

Google Analytics users wanting to collect and take advantage
of User Timings data will have to add a JavaScript timing code to the
interactions they want to track by using the trackTiming API included in ga.js
(version 5.2.6+), which lets site owners track visitor action timings related
to events that don’t directly correspond to page views. To enhance
organization, these can be defined using categories, variables and optional labels.

User Timings reports can be accessed by going to the Content
tab of a Google Analytics dashboard and clicking on the “User Timings” section,
where there are three tabs to review. Explorer, Performance and Map Overlay each provide different views of user timings.

Explorer shows information about average user timing and
user timing sample by Timing Category, Timing Variable or Timing Label. The
Performance tab tells site owners which timings are the most common for user
timings. And Map Overlay gives owners a view of how users in different
geographical regions experience site speed.